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Amazon Elastic Block Store

Amazon EBS provides durable block volumes and incremental snapshots for EC2 instances, with volume types tuned for general-purpose, high-IOPS, throughput, or cold workloads.

Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon Elastic Block Store.

Amazon Elastic Block Store pricing and cost programs

Pricing model: Provisioned block storage

On-Demand
Available
Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
Not applicable
Savings Plans
Not applicable
Spot
Not applicable

Billing dimensions: GB-month · Provisioned IOPS · Provisioned throughput · Snapshots

Programs and modes: Volume types · Snapshot archive · Fast Snapshot Restore

Volume type determines whether IOPS and throughput are included or provisioned separately.

Free Tier: Available — verify current offers

Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.

Official AWS pricing

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.

Why implement Amazon Elastic Block Store?

  • Provides low-latency persistent block devices that survive instance replacement and can be resized or retuned independently of compute.
  • Offers SSD and HDD volume families with separately configurable capacity, IOPS, and throughput for operating systems, databases, and sequential workloads.
  • Uses incremental snapshots for backup, cloning, cross-Region recovery, and volume creation in another Availability Zone.

How to implement Amazon Elastic Block Store

  1. Select a volume type from workload IOPS, throughput, latency, size, and cost requirements, and create the encrypted volume in the EC2 instance's Availability Zone.
  2. Attach, partition, format, mount, and persist the device mapping, then verify both instance and volume limits can deliver the provisioned performance.
  3. Enable CloudWatch alarms and status monitoring, automate application-consistent snapshots, and document initialization and restoration procedures.

Amazon Elastic Block Store best practices

  • Enable encryption by default, separate operating-system and application data where useful, and never treat an attached volume as a substitute for backups.
  • Choose gp3 unless another type's IOPS or throughput profile is justified, monitor queue depth and saturation, and account for EC2 bandwidth limits.
  • Schedule snapshots with AWS Backup or Data Lifecycle Manager, test restores, and initialize restored volumes before latency-sensitive production cutovers.

Amazon Elastic Block Store use cases and server impact

  • EC2 boot and application volumes
  • Database and transactional block storage
  • Throughput-oriented logs, analytics, and staging volumes

Replaces SAN or virtual-disk capacity for EC2, but file systems, replication, application consistency, snapshots, and cross-AZ recovery remain design responsibilities.

Official implementation resources

Commonly paired AWS services